Revision as of 20:43, 29 January 2013

Pacaur is an Arch User Repository (AUR) helper aiming at speed and simplicity, designed to minimize user prompt interaction and to use an uncluttered interface. It is written in Bash and built upon the well designed cower and expac C backends.

Note: Pacaur is targeted to advanced users who wants some degree of automation for repetitive tasks. As such, the user is expected to be familiar with the manual build process.

Philosophy

Pacaur main feature revolves around a fast workflow idea, that is, spending as less time as possible interacting with package management prompts. The objectives of speed, simplicity and uncluttered interface were also taken into consideration.

Design concept:

simply extends pacman to manage the AUR rather than adding lot of features.

fast workflow to minimize user interaction.

usable as a single tool to manage official and AUR packages or as a separate AUR frontend (pacman-like and cower-like interfaces).

ready to be run on any system (bash script + C libraries).

built upon existing tools (cower, expac, sudo, pacman-color)

Main characteristics:

retrieve and edit all PKGBUILDs before building anything.

check and solve all conflicts before building anything.

pass arguments to pacman when appropriate.

search provides regex support (through cower).

show current *and* available version when checking update.

very good performance with minimal memory footprint (C backend).

enhanced security.

Features not implemented "by design":

no "interactive" mode.

no customizedpkg support.

no complete dependencies recomputation after you've added/removed some of them. Only binary dependency checking is handled through makepkg.

no internationalization.

Installation

You can then install cowerAUR as a dependency, and then pacaurAUR itself. Both those packages are available from the AUR. You will have to install them with the official method for installing unsupported packages.

Note: All users should be familiar with the build process. You can take this as an opportunity to learn what are the operations that AUR helpers make automatic.

The package pacman-colorAUR is optional but highly recommended for adding color output support.

Userbase target

Two types of users are in mind:

those who prefer to have one single tool to manage AUR and official repositories,

those who prefer to keep their AUR frontend separate from Pacman.

As such there are two sets of commands:

commands that wrap the pacman binary (-S, -Ss, -Si, -Sw. -Su, -Qu, -Sc) and extend its functions to the AUR. This behavior can be disabled with the fallback variable in the config file.

commands that are AUR specific (-s, -i, -m, -y, -k, -u).

Example

pacaur -Ss package will search the repo, then the AUR if necessary (fallback enabled).

Troubleshooting

There are almost no useful option in the config file. How do I...?

Pacaur fully honors pacman and makepkg environment variables, as well as the sudo configuration and cower config file (if existing).

Pacman upgrade

When upgrading pacman to a newer version, pacman fails due to dependency conflicts with an older version of cower or pacaur. In pacman.conf, try adding them to the SyncFirst variable:

SyncFirst = pacman cower pacaur

Using gvim as editor

When using gvim as editor, gvim opens but the build continues. In pacaur.conf, try:

editor="gvim --nofork"

Host name error

When checking AUR packages for updates, pacaur outputs a lot of "Couldn't resolve host name" and "Timeout was reached" messages in spite of the internet line working correctly.

Try using Google primary DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4), or

Tweak cower's config file to decrease the number of threads used in "MaxThread" variable.

Password timeout

When building a package that takes a long time to compile, sudo times out and pacaur does ask to enter the password again right before installing the package. If this is not done in a default delay of 5 min (typically if you went grabbing a coffee while waiting the build to finish), the password prompt times out and the install fails.